Many digital systems use counters for various applications. For example, in an Ethernet computer network peripheral device, counters are used to keep track of various statistics such as how many bytes of a data packet have arrived at the computer network peripheral device. Moreover, counters within a single digital system may require counting to numerous different clock frequencies.
Each of these numerous clock frequencies may be generated by a respective clock frequency source. However, implementing a separate clock frequency source may be an expensive solution as the cost of each clock frequency source may be high. Moreover, for a digital system which is incorporated within a single integrated circuit, each clock frequency source may take up a large area on the integrated circuit. In addition, having multiple clock frequency sources may lead to more complexity in layout of the integrated circuit in routing the various clock frequencies throughout the integrated circuit.
Rather, a digital system may be more simple to implement as an integrated circuit if the numerous clock frequencies are locally synthesized from another central clock frequency already available on the digital system or if a counter requiring a count to a desired clock frequency is implemented using the given central clock frequency that is already available.